QuaRCS Study Information

The QuaRCS national study is now underway and we are recruiting instructors! Whether or not you feel you emphasize numerical skills in your course, you can help!

The Quantitative Reasoning for College Science Assessment is an IRB-approved quantitative literacy assessment instrument specifically targeted for college-level general education STEM courses. It contains 25 quantitative questions that assess the following skills: graph reading, table reading, arithmetic, proportional reasoning, estimation, percentages, statistics/probability, area/volume, error, and unit conversions/dimensional analysis. These ten skills were selected based on educator responses to a survey asking them to rank various numerical skills according to their importance in science and in daily life.

Skills_ranked — A summary of our skill survey for astronomy and math/numeracy educators. The average responses for Astronomy educators are shown with red symbols, and Math/Numeracy educators are shown with blue symbols. Circles indicate opinions about the importance of these skills for science literacy, and squares indicate their importance in everyday life.

The quantitative questions on the instrument are followed by a series of demographic and attitudinal questions. The attitude questions, in particular, are very important to the overarching purpose of the study, which is to determine whether general education college science courses are capable of improving student skills in or beliefs about mathematics.

More details about the development of the instrument, including methodology, instrument statistics and skill selection can be found in our recent paper here.